A bout of madness brought on by "digital designitis" led to a six month break which I used to work on my sci-fi script (it's made the semi-finals in two screenplay competitions - booyah!) But like most AFOLs, the brick is too difficult to lay down and I'm currently back at it.

As it stands, I've designed all the major elements of the ship. Only the walls and floor of the dorsal city remain. Unfortunetely LDD 4.0 has this wee issue of catastrophic failure at 32,700 pieces. I'll have to finish the remaining design on a seperate file or work it out during construction (God willing).

Picking up from where we left off, I was finishing up the engine section.

My greeble technique of alternating modified plates creates a real "busy" feel to the hull. It was a challenge to blend the straight superstructure with the sloped wing, but it worked out nicely.

I experimented for weeks with a multitude of different brick tecqniques to capture this step pattern. It triggered my nervous break down and subsequent sabbatical.

I'll design the engines during construction. LDD doesn't possess the correct cylinder pieces I require. The engine section took a hair-pulling three months to finish.

Forward belly groove. I used the step algorithim from the engine section here.

The opposing half of the groove is similar enough that I can mirror it during construction. The same goes with the unfinished aft section.

I had hoped to create a 30 stud length hull segment and copy and paste it ten times to create the entire trench. Unfortuntely, you could detect the repeating pattern and it was visually distracting. I had to assemble it one grueling piece at a time.

Next, the most difficult aspect of the design, the dorsal city. What I call the "mind-killer." I had to stare at this image for a good two hours just to figure out what the heck was going on.

There are 25 rectangular blocks of varying height, width and length that need to be positioned correctly with respect to each other AND the ship's hull. I spent a month of tinkering to get them just right.

I carefully studied images to get ALL the minor details I could discern. Piece variety is short at this scale. I still need to go over it a few times to break up some of the visual monotony.

This is the style for the walls I'm going for.

I want the city to light up in the dark as well, but it makes the model look a bit cartoonish. Maybe I'll just drop the light effect altogether.

I had to raise the city up a few times to get it at the correct height. Takes an hour each time.

Long shot. I had to adjust her overall length. She's about 12'4" now. I estimate her final piece count to be around 70,000, with a weight of 150 pounds. As for cash, I'm hoping to sell my Mon Cal. and fund the project that way.

While on his "coffee break" a tipsy slave Kelso took a bit of a tumble and became permanently entombed wihin the framework of the ship.

Luckily, the Empire used their cloning capabilities to create an army of slave Kelsos to replace him.

I hope you enjoyed the commentary, thanks for visiting! Now join me in a prayer for the construction of this beast. It's gonna take a miracle!

Truly amazing! The only thing I would change is making the city part dark grey to get the contrast that seems to show on screen. All of your ships are works of art, and I hope to see the finished product of this on here at some point... best of luck!

If you really want to sell Home One, I think you should seriously consider getting in contact with somebody at Legoland California. They've been hauling in Star Wars models recently for their miniland. From Bricks to Bothans (fbtb.net) has a couple articles & pics on it. Check it out!

Second favorite after your Venator. I use bricklinks to buy bricks myself but it gets to be a pain because it really is just hundreds of different sites put together and gets difficult when ordering parts for a set as you end up using 10 stores. but keep it up it looks great! actually it kinda looks like if the actual ship were being constructed in a shipyard. As for a future suggestion or more as an idea i want to throw past you, Death Star.

"LDD doesn't possess the correct cylinder pieces I require"
If you don't plan on buying the pieces from LDD, you can always try the Lego Universe theme for the software, it has every pieces available in every color, and i do mean EVERY single one available on the market ! But the buy feature is not supported at all, any piece will be considered a "non buyable part"...
If you did plan on buying it via LDD and/or already knew about LU mode, then sorry for the useless com :)
But seriously check it out if you didn't know this already : http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=40794
EDIT : my bad, there are some pieces that are not listed, but very few

HOOOOOW DUDE !!!!! You gonna kill all of us with this project !! You allready buried alive a poor Kelso slave..... Anyway, I still don't know how you will start... So many parts and greebles. I would be totaly lost !! I'm so impatient to see this and unfortunately, I don't have enought money for buying you 'MON":-((((

WOW! i hardly had the patience to build cars in that program so hats off to you, You have the patience of Jobe! Do u have any idea how much that's gonna costs? or how many trucks it'll take to bring it to you're door?

Wow. You should have uploaded the LDD file of what you have done so far so that we can marvel at its beauty and our computers would crash. Are all the pieces off the LDD pallete? I wonder how big the box would be...

Frankly, I'm gobsmacked. I thought that the Stuff I made was large, (it takes about 10 minutes to move ANYTHING) but this creation is on a whole new level of insanity! Seriously though, I hope that this project works out for you. good luck!

May I suggest you make the the city dark grey? I think that your star destroyer doesn't quite have that proper contrast between the city and the main structure. It does look amazing though, goodluck and godspeed.

Absolutely fantastic! I think your Mon Cal was probably the best Star Wars creation I have seen in a long time, and this baby is looking even better! I hope you can afford it, because it looks incredibly beastly!

Looking fantastic, Thomas! I wish I had the time and the funds to attmept a ship of this scale. I have all the faith in the world that you'll pull this off beautifully, though, so I can live vicariously through your monumental efforts. Breathtaking detail you've got going on in there, too. Although, I'm not too sure about a clone army of Kelso's...one's more than the world seems to be able to stomach! Keep up the brilliant work!

I fully understand why LDD (Universe) is so important to use. Nowadays I use that program for any reallife build I plan on making. When the design get´s more and more intricate, the more important it is to make sure it will turn out the exactly as you want it irl. Even though my great white shark "only" contains 5000+ parts, I know how frustrating it can be to make it all fit together as good as possible. I even have plans on making a fullsize great white shark (20-footer) in LDD in the future! Hrrmm...well I wish you all luck with this monsterbuild of yours! //Dave

I can see how maddening this project is, considering the amount of energy you have poured into it. I can tell that in time, this design will become even better, and once the brick-building itself is underway, I believe it'll look marvelous. Keep up the fantastic work!

A mindblowing project! I hope you already consider how to prevent the star destroyer from bending. LDD doesn't show the strength of your model. I found myself with those challenges as well. It's already a major achievement to get this build in LDD! Thanks for sharing.

Master Thomas does it again, it looks realy great, or should I say completely madness. I've build several large structures with LDD. Never went up to 32000 ore more but each time I had the same problem. Not the building part was difficult, that went wel, but creating the building instruction took a lot of time (hours) and once it was there, the LDD program lost all my logic in building my creation. It starts building different layers at the same time, and when you try to mirror elements you really do not know were you are. I suppose that maybe I'm not that smart and I really do hope you can build this baby. And for the mon calamari, you'll certainly find a buyer...If you were not living on the other side of the ocean I would come to see it. Take care, don't go crazy and don't pull out your hair....

Hi Thomas,
what a burden. Or bless. It brings a bit of the unfeasible into your life, does it? Is it frightening or a goal like heaven? What it sure gonna be: a cool beast...
Wish you all the passion of the world...